That must have been a wild time back in 1966. My father had just bought his first Philips stereo tape recorder, and I was born with the tape recorder virus genetically infused into me, at 4.75 cm/sec. At the age of 8, I bought my first tube tape recorders at the flea market, always hoping to find one that met my sound demands at the time. However, those early devices were mostly junk, and it wasn’t until I was 12 that I learned how to tame tube technology.
So I settled for small cassette recorders for a while, as they were cheaper and easier to repair. Then, at the age of 11, my father bequeathed me his Uher Royal de Lux, as he saw it more in my room than in the living room. Unfortunately, it was already in bad shape at that time, and I didn’t have the money to buy new tape heads. Looking back, the device wasn’t particularly stable, and the tape heads were so soft that they didn’t even last for 200 tapes. Of course, I had to get a replacement, which came in the form of a Philips 4450. Oh, I had swapped it for an A77, as two tracks were too expensive in terms of tape consumption. From today’s perspective, it was a completely justified decision, as getting a well-preserved 4450 now would be nearly impossible. It was probably a bad trade back then, but it looked so impressive, somehow the A700 for the little man 🙂
But as always, I was still not completely satisfied with the sound quality. Nevertheless, I grabbed an old tube gem at one or the other Sunday flea market, and more and more machines disappeared one by one into the attic. It’s the smell of the heating tubes that makes these old machines so unmistakable. But I was still looking for a solution to dropouts and poor treble reproduction, and it came in the form of an auto-reverse AKAI with tough heads and a high-pitched sound.
However, since mixing audio material was still the focus, I gradually built my first small studios, with which we produced contact cassettes and answering machine messages. But the times called for something better, something official! And since my FM radio time was slowly beginning, I naturally needed players for jingles, and that’s where the good old A77s came into play. One of them was even converted into a high-speed version.
